


Intermission: Preliminary Investigation

by gentlearmor



Series: Legacy of the Star [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Investigation, Moral Sacrifice, Politics Suck, child molestation (after the fact), drautos: asshole or hero?, hard choices, no graphic depictions of the former tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 07:09:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21406216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlearmor/pseuds/gentlearmor
Summary: Two days before the last chapter of Lost Star, Cor starts to honor Lunafreya's request to investigate the rumors that Lucian forces were pulled out one day before her mother was killed, over in Tenebrae.(That makes sense if you read Lost Star, but you don't need to know this subplot from Lost Star... like... about as much as you need Kingsglaive for playing FFXV, so take that as the subjective statement it is haha.)
Series: Legacy of the Star [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1538188
Kudos: 16





	Intermission: Preliminary Investigation

**Author's Note:**

> You know, I’d love to hear from people. You can hmu on Discord at [ Dreams for Ghosts#6514 ] if you'd like.
> 
> Hell, if you wanna RP, hmu. Doesn’t even have to be FFXV, or one single canon, or any canon!
> 
> Or we can just talk~ I don’t bite. I can be really slow at times, but I don’t bite~
> 
> Anyway, this does come with some warnings.
> 
> WARNINGS: No justice child molestation (this will make sense as you read, and the tags above sort of tell you).
> 
> NOTE: This didn’t end as conclusively as I planned, but I realized it would be better to move that further down the line. Next up is picking up where Lost Star left off. It might take some time to get that started, but I AM working on it.

Princess Lunafreya Nox Fleuret was a remarkable young lady. Watching her grow up was truly an honor.

Cor Leonis often found rookie Crownsguard asking why it was that she and Ravus maintained their mother’s maiden name when she married the king. The answer was simple: The marriage was never meant to absorb Tenebrae. It was meant to protect it, in the hopes that one day Queen Sylva would be able to stand strong independently, again. Regis Lucis Caelum never wanted to erase the House of Fleuret.

For all of Regis’s faults, he did care for her and her children in the most innocent of senses. Sylva and Regis had slept in separate rooms, their hearts with their deceased spouses and parents of their respective children. Before he had begun to sink, slowly, into a dark place that no one could save him from, he and Sylva enjoyed one another as best friends, platonic and sweet.

It was why it was it was unfathomable that Regis would have recalled the Kingsglaive and Crownsguard stationed in Tenebrae, leaving it vulnerable to attack. Even from a tactical sense, losing Tenebrae wasn’t sound. If Luna had witnesses, that she believed, saying that the guards and glaives stationed there were ordered to retreat the day before the attack, he had to follow up on it.

To his bemusement, when he went to the records’ office in the basement of the Citadel, he discovered almost all of the information from the week of Tenebrae’s fall was all on paper. When the young man managing the office at the moment walked over and hoisted a stack of paper-filled notebooks nearly two-and-a-half feet tall, Cor stared at it, and then looked at him.

“…you’re kidding.”

“Sorry. I looked, and we have no digital copies on file, sir,” the young man, Custo, said, and he frowned. “If you’re willing to wait a couple of weeks, we can transfer these things to digital format first.”

Cor would’ve normally thrown a fit, but the guy was not much older than Noctis would be at that time. He couldn’t answer for decisions made back then.

“I’ll have things brought down as I complete my research, and I want you to transfer them as you receive them,” he decided, stepping in to sign out the document mountain.

“Of course, sir.”

“And don’t let this happen again.”

“We don’t, sir. Almost everything is done digitally now. We spend most our time turning out hard records,” Custo explained. “But when we do get hard records, we immediately turn them digital.”

“Is there anyone who seems to be the worst? I can talk to them for you.”

Custo thought about it with a hum, looking off for a moment. “Most Crownsguard are really good about it, unless they just couldn’t get to a computer or something. The Kingsglaive are pretty bad at it, though. I mean, when they do turn in their reports.”

“They’re not turning in field reports?”

“Field reports, training reports, equipment check-out or check-in forms… it’s all the same. It all gets to us eventually. We try to not pressure them since they’re out at war all the time, but…”

“I’ll talk to Drautos,” Cor promised. “I don’t care if they’ve all lost an arm. That documentation is important to have in time.” He more than sympathized with the warworn glaives, but reports were damn important to the smooth function of that place, especially as Regis seemed to progressively deteriorate.

Cor set the digital pen down he signed off with on a bolted-down screen, and carefully picked up the stack of reports. “May I borrow a cart?”

“Oh, yes, right away! Good idea, sir.”

Custo was quick to bring over a cart designed for the office to carry such documents to their respective lockers and shelves, and soon it was full of the paper-stacked giant, and Cor was on his way.

Thirty minutes after that, he was entering his office and beginning with the top.

Two hours, and barely through the first notebook, and he was accompanied by Monica Elshett, who took on the next notebook for him, and was as baffled about it all being hard copies as he was.

“So, I’m on three days until the attack here, and there’s no withdrawal order,” she commented as she closed the notebook and set it aside.

“Nothing on four days until, either,” Cor agreed grimly. He handed her the next, two days until, and took the larger ‘day before’ for himself. “I can’t even find who was issuing orders at the time of all of this.”

“All of you,” Monica commented. She turned in her seat and threw her legs over the arm rest. “According to the other notebook.”

“I wasn’t sending any orders at that time,” Cor commented distantly, deep in thought. “The Crownsguard stationed there were to receive orders from Her Majesty and, if they ever returned, Their Highnesses, her children.”

“Well, someone was under the impression you were sending route changes.”

Cor hummed and drew silent, trying to reserve judgment, but he couldn’t help the increasing sinking feeling in his stomach that something was very wrong.

Unfortunately, they didn’t get very far into the next notebooks before there was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Cor beckoned.

The door opened, and Dustin Ackers entered, prim and proper as always. “I’m sorry, Marshal, but we have a problem.”

Cor sighed and closed his book, standing and rounding the desk. “Just finish that and notate it, then get back to your normal duties,” he directed Monica.

“Right away, Marshal,” she said without looking up. Behind closed doors, it was perfectly acceptable for the ones who served directly under Cor to be a little informal. They worked hard and knew when that was alright and when it wasn’t, so he didn’t think twice by how she behaved, following Dustin out of the office.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he walked with Dustin.

“One of the cooks is claiming a member of the court has been inappropriate with his daughter.”

“And?”

“His twelve year old daughter.”

Cor squinted at that. “That’s a serious allegation.” Especially since Regis’s decree.

“One I’ve taken care to investigate. It happened very suddenly, but he said the encounter was violent, and his little one’s an impeccably brave little girl,” Dustin remarked. He pulled his phone, and spent a moment to get to his photo gallery, and passed it to Cor. “Fortunately, we have one single camera that picked up on the councilman guiding her to one of the back elevator lobbies.”

Cor took the phone and started to flip through the pictures. Bruises on little wrists, a little neck, in the prints of large hands. Bruising on small thighs and hips. In one of the pictures, he could see a man in a chef’s outfit in the background. “This the father?”

“Yeah.”

“Mother?”

“She serves the Amicitia household,” Dustin advised. “Needless to say, Clarus is…”

“Got it.” Clarus was one of the most loyal household lords, protecting his workers viciously and making certain they lived well. It was admirable, and most council members used him as an example… but there would always be outliers. People masquerading themselves as good, upstanding citizens to get voted in. This case had to be one of the worst scenarios he’d seen, however. He worried this would end the democracy in allowing people to vote from different regions for a representative to sit on the council, to be a member of Regis’s court. He’d already discussed ending it, and it was by a fraction that Clarus and Cor had been able to sway that option away from him.

“The king doesn’t know?” Cor asked next.

“No. Clarus is too mad. I took it to him, first, and he said he’s too biased to be handling the situation. We’re holding Mr. Trinia in his suite on the council’s floor.”

“Good.” Cor stopped at an elevator to punch the call button, and turned to Dustin. “If the king’s to hear about it, he’ll hear about it from me and me alone,” he directed, releasing the phone to Dustin once more.

“Yes, marshal.”

“Once Monica joins you, go see if the family is in need of anything. Do whatever you need to in order to ensure they keep quiet. They’ll get their justice.”

“Should I mention the ramifications on elections should this go public…?” Dustin asked.

The elevator doors opened and Cor stepped on. After he turned back and pressed his call button, he said, “Yes, but use Monica. And offer a year’s worth of pay for both parents if it looks like they don’t want to cooperate. I doubt they will refuse, though.”

“As do I, sir.”

The elevator doors closed then, and Cor folded his arms over his chest. The rest of his trek was spent in an icy silence that no one wanted to break when he emerged from the elevator and went for the suite, then under guard by two grim-looking Crownsguard.

The only one who dared to speak was the one to Cor’s right, just as he went up to the door. “Ruin him, sir,” he requested darkly.

Cor paused, but didn’t respond as he pushed inside, and closed the door behind him. Arvo Trinia, who had been seated on his couch with his arms folded, shot to his feet. “Oh, thank god, now I can get back to work,” he rambled, walking over for Cor.

Cor continued to walk despite the approach. In a dark, warning tone, he said, “Sit down before I make you sit down.” As he spoke, he walked right up into the face of Trinia, whose face fell at the order, and he stepped back from Cor, immediately deferring to him.

Once Trinia was seated, staring at him with wide eyes from his couch, Cor rested a hand on his katana, it appearing sheathed and ready at his side.

“I’ve never understood men like you,” he said as he stared the man down. “I realize this comes from home. You’re raised thinking that because you’re you, you can do no wrong. You hurt someone, and the people around you explain it away as an accident, or someone else did it. So then you become an adult, and a degenerate.”

“What Ackers is accusing me of, I simply didn’t do,” Trinia insisted.

“Except we have footage of you with her,” Cor retorted. “Really, you think the king wouldn’t keep tabs on every single person that lives here, in every place they could go?” He was absolutely bluffing, obviously, but the beauty was that Cor wasn’t known to bluff, and he was damn good at being convincing.

“…the king knows?” Trinia asked, eyes wide.

“Not yet, but we’ll have to show him the footage today. Unless…”

“I’ll… I’ll do anything, marshal,” the councilman implored, wide-eyed.

Cor really hated the situation he found himself in. It was so important that Regis not take away the last voice the people really had in their electing members for the royal court, and with his death sentences for men like Arvo Trinia, he would surely take away those elections, since the people ‘clearly couldn’t be trusted with such decisions any longer’.

In the end, Cor believed sentencing sexual predators, tried and proven guilty, deserved death. Regis was going about it the wrong way with summary execution, but he believed the end result was justified for the crime. But there was a lot at stake, and he had to make a choice.

“You will hand in a resignation to the king’s office, and to your district,” Cor ordered in a dark growl. “And you will, with your last day of free travel allowed, leave Insomnia. Say the stress was getting to you, and you had to leave, and let them pick someone who isn’t a monster to take office.”

Trinia stood and bowed to Cor. “I’ll do that, marshal—thank y—”

“This is no favor to you,” Cor interrupted, stunning the man to silence. “If the king asks too many questions, you’ll have destroyed the democracy we have left here. And know, no matter where you go in this world, I have eyes there. I will know if you so much as look improperly in anyone’s direction. And the day you do is the day they’ll find you dead. I’ll take your head myself.” He pulled his katana partway from its sheath in emphasis, making Trinia’s knees give out and he fell back to the couch. “Are we clear?”

“…yes.”

“Louder.”

Trinia cleared his throat, and tore his eyes off the katana, in favor of meeting Cor’s eyes. “Y-Yes, marshal. Crystal clear.”

“Get to writing then.”

With that, Cor left. He passed orders to the Crownsguard on duty to keep everything quiet, and why. He trusted them implicitly to understand. They would take over ensuring he did as was ordered, and went where ordered.

Explaining the decision to Clarus was… difficult to do, but Cor was grateful he understood. It was an absolute miscarriage of justice, but they were left with no choice in the greater scheme of things. Maybe if Regis hadn’t gone the way he had, inexplicably, they wouldn’t be where they were at that point in time. He couldn’t even say if the decision involving Trinia would be frowned upon by the people, honestly, that was how messed up the world felt those days.

By the time he returned back to his office, Monica had long left, with cliff notes she’d drawn up set atop the binder. He took up the paper to begin reading under the single desk lamp he turned on for light, when a small shift from the shadows of his then-dark office caught his attention, off in the corner of his vision.

“I suggest that if you’re here to speak to me, you start doing so, otherwise we’re going to have a problem,” he advised without looking up from his paper.

“…sorry,” a woman’s voice apologize. He looked up and over finally, and raised an eyebrow when the speaker stepped forward enough to be seen. While he didn’t know her name, or even her face, she was wearing the field uniform of the Kingsglaive. “I wasn’t sure if I should be doing this.”

“Doing what, precisely?”

When she didn’t respond, but rather just stared at him with wide eyes, he sighed a bit and gestured to the chair Monica had occupied earlier in the day, and took his own seat as well. She lowly did so, and folded her hands in her lap. She had a rather demure way about her, but so did Monica, and Cor had seen how brutal she could be in a fight. Glaives, much more recently battleworn, were more so.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“…Crowe Altius, marshal,” she replied, hesitant even about that.

Cor squinted his eyes. “You’re a sentinel, yes?”

It was her turn to raise her eyebrows. “How did you—”

“I might not be in your direct chain of command, but I try to at least remember the glaive roster,” he advised. “Crowe, if you have something you need to say in confidence, you’re welcome to. Nothing leaves my office, at least not with your name, depending on what it is.”

The young woman nodded and shifted in her seat, looking to the side, into the darkness for a time. “I joined the Kingsglaive shortly after the fall of Tenebrae,” she said. “When it was still fresh on the minds of the troops. I learned a lot about how the majority of glaives feel about the situation with the king really early on. Things I’m sure you have no idea about, because superiors don’t really get to hear these things.”

“Of course.”

“Some of them were hard to hear. I’m Lucian, not from Galadh like a good majority of the Kingsglaive. Those I got close to, good guys with more neutral feelings about the world, taught me to just keep my head down. But I then I heard you’ve been asked by the princess to look into Tenebrae.”

Cor was curious as to how it got out, but he supposed the mere fact that he checked out all those binders containing all the reports from that incident might’ve gotten out, so he didn’t ask. If it became troublesome, he could inquire later.

“I have been. Evidently, she was told that the men and women we had stationed over there received an order to abandon the palace, but I know King Regis, nor Clarus Amicitia, nor I gave that order,” Cor decided to say. “And nothing in the reports speak about it.”

Crowe nodded her head. “…because they were told it was an ‘off-the-books, do not discuss’ order,” she clarified. “And most are convinced of that, but the few who aren’t are glaives, and… believe it was Titus Drautos who impersonated the orders.”

Cor narrowed his eyes in thought. “Why would he do that?”

“I believe he has… anti-Lucian sentiments,” she admitted. “Just the way he doesn’t shut down the others when they rant about the king, his policies, the fact that he fed our only hope of ending the Starscourge to an unknown factor… He’s careful around those of us from Lucis and not Galadh or other places.”

A silence followed as Cor thought about all of that. There wasn’t anything with Drautos that struck him as anti-Lucian, but then again, he could’ve just been a hell of an actor. He would have to investigate and see what he could find on his own, but that gave him a head start.

“May I make an observation about something, marshal?” Crowe asked after she realized Cor was checking out on her.

“Yes, of course.”

“I think… based on what I heard, that the call came the day before, to order them to pull out… that he knew in advance what was coming, and wanted to spare the lives of our forces.”

“I’m thinking that as well, based on what you’re saying,” Cor agreed. “Otherwise, it’s a hell of a coincidence, and very little is mere coincidence in our respective professions.” Crowe snorted and nodded. “I’d like you, if you feel comfortable, to keep your ear on the ground for me. With the king’s new decrees, I’ve been busy organizing… those… events. I’m having to dedicate free time to this investigation, and if I could have someone on the inside just keeping an ear out…”

Crowe pursed her lips, not appearing thrilled with the request. “And how do I explain conversing with you if caught?”

“You’ve been interested in what it would take to bridge from the Kingsglaive to the Crownsguard,” Cor suggested, resting back in his seat. “So I’ve been doing reviews and tests with you to see how you’re doing. That’ll give us a language to use if you have something to report from outside this room.”

“Alright. I can live with that.” She stood up and crossed her arm over her chest, to salute Cor and take her leave. “For hearth and home, sir.”

Cor nodded, and watched her go for the window. So that was how she got in. At least he wouldn’t have to change the locks of the office, but Kingsglaive were like really precocious flies with their warping. It made him… a little sad, because he always imagined Noctis would’ve been just as annoying, and in a similarly endearing way, once he got to learning how to warp. Cor had heard the stories of Regis’s childhood, and anticipated it from him.

At the window, Crowe sat on the sill and slid around to sit with her legs on the outside, but she didn’t warp away just yet. “…is it true that the Crystal changed color?”

Cor turned his chair around to face her once more. “It is. Red to blue.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“Well, traditionally, blue, purple, the cooler colors are attributed to the Lucii, so yes, I think it’s good.”

“Huh.” She looked out over the city visible from that high up, as well as the Wall as it waved like water above their heads. “Maybe Prince Noctis is finally going to come home.”

“All the more reason to have as little political strife around. If he gets here, he’s going to be very confused.”

“…probably bothered, too.”

Cor heard that hesitation, Crowe clearly worried about expressing that. She was in luck, though. Cor didn’t see it as anti-Lucian or anti-government. It sounded like someone very worried for their kingdom and their throne. A lot of people felt Noctis would be the key to freeing Regis’s suddenly rapidly-clenching fist of tyranny, it seemed.

Regardless, Cor didn’t express that, simply saying, “Be safe, glaive.” The calm dismissal would say everything he needed it to.

She nodded and dropped from the window, the sound of her warp breaking the air shortly after. Cor shook his head and turned back to his desk.

If Titus Drautos made that call because he knew, and didn’t want to see Lucian forces suffer, it had both troublesome implications, and connotations of redemption. The glaive could also be trying to see the best in her commanding officer, too. It gave him a solid lead, however. One he would dispatch Monica and Dustin on as soon as he could meet with them. They were the best he had at covert operations.

Either way—whether Drautos had somehow come into possession of enemy intelligence he didn’t report to the rest of them, or whether he was actually connected to the enemy—they needed to prove he was involved in that apparent early abandonment of Tenebrae, and then prove the ‘why’ behind it to figure out what needed to be done.

Those days, Cor would work with Drautos if he meant the best, and just handled it in the worst way possible. What was done, was done, and they needed as many people as possible who were loyal to Regis, but willing to go against him in the shadows without hurting him.

However.

If Drautos was a spy, or a double agent, of some sort, then not even the Astrals would be able to save him from Cor ‘The Immortal’ Leonis.


End file.
